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Contrapuntal Lines: Nostalgia in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano

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Contrapuntal Lines: Nostalgia in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano Camelia Gradinaru / Contrapuntal Lines: Nostalgia in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano META: RESEARCH IN HERMENEUTICS, PHENOMENOLOGY, AND PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY VOL. IX, NO. 2 / DECEMBER 2017: 607-629, ISSN 2067-3655, www.metajournal.org Contrapuntal Lines: Nostalgia in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano Camelia Gradinaru “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi Abstract The paper focuses on the modalities of nostalgia in a techno-saturated world. Nostalgia is a protean concept that maintains a strong relationship with technology. The latter can mediate, alleviate or trigger nostalgic feelings and discourses orientated not only towards the past, but also towards the present and the future. In this respect, this paper will investigate how nostalgia was used as a narrative tool by Kurt Vonnegut in his Player Piano at several important levels of the plot and how it becomes a character that acts obscurely in some key moments. Firstly, I will analyse the modalities through which nostalgia develops a subtle relationship with technology and progress. Secondly, I will examine how the occurrences of player piano work in the novel as clues that foreshadow the on-coming intrusion of this feeling in the current mood of the personages. Thirdly, I will discuss the nostalgia for humanity in the framework offered by postmodernism. The crisis of metanarratives does not drive nostalgia towards a simple past, but it steers it towards a set of petite histoires that blurs the temporal orientation of nostalgia. Keywords: nostalgia, player piano, technology, postmodernism, simulacra, hybridity, postmodern humanism, Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano Introduction Nostalgia has become “an obsession of both mass culture and high art” (Hutcheon and Valdés 1998, 18), a versatile concept that “frustrates psychologists, sociologists, literary theorists and philosophers, even computer scientists.” (Boym 2001, xvii) It maintains a strong relationship with technology; the latter can mediate, alleviate, trigger or collect nostalgic feelings and discourses orientated not only towards the past, 607 META: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy – IX (2) / 2017 but also towards the present and the future. The literature represents another valuable archive of nostalgic approaches; even if not all of its works are documentaries, the ways in which this feeling is described in various fictions are relevant when we search for its deep understanding. Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel Player Piano, published in 1952, represents a perfect illustration of blending the themes of technical progress, metaphysical inquiries, and nostalgia. With a non-homogeneous critical evaluation that ranges from a “condescending dismissal” to an “enthusiastic praise as an outstanding and original masterpiece” (Freese 2002, 158), with a constantly changing classification as utopia or dystopia, modernist or postmodernist work, Player Piano is revered as a milestone of the universal literature. In this article, I will analyse how nostalgia was used as a narrative tool by Kurt Vonnegut in his Player Piano at several important levels of the plot and how it becomes a character that acts obscurely in some key moments. Firstly, I will investigate the modalities in which nostalgia develops a subtle relationship with technology and progress. Secondly, I will examine how the occurrences of player piano work in the novel as clues that foreshadow the on-coming intrusion of this feeling in the current mood of the personages. Thirdly, I will analyse the nostalgia for humanity within the postmodernist framework. The crisis of metanarratives does not drive nostalgia towards a simple past, but it steers it towards a set of petite histoires that blurs the temporal orientation of nostalgia. 1. Technology and nostalgia: the extension of a beautiful friendship The discourses about technology are highly polarized: on the one hand, technology has been interpreted as a factor of progress, of individual life enhancement and societal development. In this paradigm, we can find both moderate views and utopias. On the other hand, technology has been seen as an artificial element that turned the tide, reducing the human power in favour of machines and tools. According to this view, technology is the ominous factor that overbalanced the natural way of things and generated dystopias. Anyhow, the 608 Camelia Gradinaru / Contrapuntal Lines: Nostalgia in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano technological dimension of human condition is hard to be avoided (Ferré 1995), being a consequence of the “homo faber” structure that we inherit. As Martin Heidegger (2010, 100) put it, “everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it.” Moreover, the techno-sphere put pressure in order to answer deep interrogations about humanity, community, power and the meaning of life. As Svetlana Boym pointed out in her seminal book The Future of Nostalgia (2001), every new technology affects “the relationship between distance and intimacy that is at the core of nostalgic sentiment” (2001, 346). Moreover, nostalgia is profoundly dependent on mnemonic devices because we remember more often the mediated experiences (Davis 1979). In a fundamental way, the connection between these two concepts is that both “are about mediation” (Boym 2001, 346); they mediate among temporal axis, spatial locations, individual and group representations. For instance, media constantly redefine the past and select the events that may become landmarks of public memory. A latent danger for the mediated nostalgic content is the ideological bias brought by selection, organisation and presentation. Following Foucault, we have to support the claim that “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers” (1981, 52). In this context, “the collapse of memory” (Hoskins 2004, 110) indicates the capacity of media to recreate a past that is presented as doubtless. Technological mediated experiences can also become prosthetic because “our perception of the past is merely an experience of the technical substrate.” (Barnet 2003) This primacy of technologies in the processes of creating and reproducing memories can be balanced by the perspectives that take into consideration “the items’ agency, the way they interact with the mind.” (van Dijk 2007, 36) A technologically supersaturated epoch constitutes the perfect frame for the nostalgic feelings and discourses about older forms of life, less technologically dependent and maybe more authentic. As Debord (1995) emphasised, technology produces isolation and alienation. Thus, the desire to overcome 609 META: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy – IX (2) / 2017 them, the yearning for the past and the search for meaning become a natural way of reaction in times of change. The everyday techno-sphere shapes the practices of remembering, archiving and oblivion; it remains a nostalgic trigger and also a contributing factor to nostalgia. If technology is associated with speed, the nostalgia induces deceleration, the slowing down of the rhythm through reflection and contemplation. The progress exacerbates nostalgic feelings and in the eras of historical upheavals “nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defence mechanism.” (Boym 2001, xiv) In the same vein, we can notice that “our obsessions with memory function as a reaction formation against the accelerating technical processes that are transforming our Lebenswelt (lifeworld) in quite distinct ways.” (Huyssen 1995, 7) Thus, the technologizing of life is accompanied with a kernel of nostalgia for times less dependent on technology or even for its obsolescent forms. But all the above prove that nostalgia is not just a retrospective force, but also a prospective one. Nostalgia can be “quite beneficial” (Wilson 2005, 7), and it has been “an important but rarely acknowledged aspect of the radical imagination” (Bonnett 2010, 1). Imbuing the past with meaning in order to change the present by thinking about the future seems to be the one of the fruitful axes of nostalgia. Thus, nostalgia has a progressive and sometimes a radical potential. The development of cybernetics repositioned these issues in the centre of discussion; the comparison between machines and human beings became critical, especially whithin a deterministic perspective about technology. Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano is the exemplification of “the tyranny of cybernetics” (Babaee, Yahya, and Sivagurunathan 2014), where machines controlled everything in the society, replacing human labour. Cybernetics represents a controlling system that automatized everything, rendering the meaning of the traditional life pointless. As Paul Proteus, the protagonist of the novel, stated (directly referring to Norbert Wiener), there are three main revolutions which shape the society: the first revolution “devaluated muscle work, then the second one devalued routine mental works” (Vonnegut 2006, 14), while in the third one machines will devaluate human thinking 610 Camelia Gradinaru / Contrapuntal Lines: Nostalgia in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (Vonnegut 2006, 15). When almost all the work and planning is done by computers and machines, the situation becomes an aporia: on the one hand, as Paul Proteus thought in the beginning of the novel, “things really were better than ever. For once, after the great bloodbath of the war, the world really was cleared of
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